Creative Future And Colourful Past
In Aberdeen this morning I found a desk next to Fiona Aitken, sat down, pulled out my secret brown envelope and told her I felt like a submarine captain. Fiona is the Senior Producer in charge of music programmes and, as far as I know, has no detailed knowledge of naval procedures. That must explain the blank look she gave me. Well, that or boredom.
"You see, " I continued, "submarine captains are given sealed orders which they lock in a safe until they are well out to sea. At a pre-arranged time they are allowed to open their orders and reveal their mission to the crew."
"Uh huh, " said Fiona, who turned her head away from me slightly and may have been silently mouthing the word 'help' to her colleagues. I pressed on.
"Similarly I have been given this sealed envelope which contains briefing notes about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Creative Future strategy. I'm not supposed to read them until ten o'clock this morning."
Fiona looked at the clock. It was five minutes to ten. She looked back at me. I tore open the envelope. I could see she was shocked.
Five minutes later I was hosting a staff meeting in the Aberdeen canteen. This began with a presentation from the Director General, Mark Thompson, which was being beamed from London to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ buildings around the country. He spoke about the need to respond to changing audiences. Viewers and listeners want more programmes 'on-demand', we need to attract more young people, we had to allow licence payers to have access to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's archive of programmes. It was all very exciting and was punctuated by short films in which members of the public spoke about their relationship with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and what they expected in the future. At the end of the session I took questions from the Aberdeen staff and then e-mailed them to London.
Ironically, when I returned to the production office, I got involved in a lively meeting about a new radio programme with a focus on the past. Magentic Memories is a new series in which people let us hear their old tape recordings. Many were made in the fifties and sixties when it became fashionable to record messages for friends and family who had moved overseas. That's when international telephone calls were expensive and cumbersome. The series will be presented by Claire White who has been listening to boxes and biscuit-tins full of submitted tapes. There's a lovely recording of a woman who visits the Royal Highland Show in the early sixties and goes on to describe the construction of the Forth Road Bridge. Another recording involves the mysterious disapperance of a Scottish ship which eventually turns up off the coast of Africa stuffed with guns and money.
This prompted me to return to my submarine theme but, strangely enough, Fiona was nowhere to be seen.
